5.18. Killing or Signalling a Process

To check out the numeric options for kill, run the command:

% kill -l
 1) SIGHUP       2) SIGINT       3) SIGQUIT      4) SIGILL
 5) SIGTRAP      6) SIGABRT      7) SIGEMT       8) SIGFPE
 9) SIGKILL     10) SIGBUS      11) SIGSEGV     12) SIGSYS
13) SIGPIPE     14) SIGALRM     15) SIGTERM     16) SIGURG
17) SIGSTOP     18) SIGTSTP     19) SIGCONT     20) SIGCHLD
21) SIGTTIN     22) SIGTTOU     23) SIGIO       24) SIGXCPU
25) SIGXFSZ     26) SIGVTALRM   27) SIGPROF     28) SIGWINCH
29) SIGINFO     30) SIGUSR1     31) SIGUSR2

See man signal.

Signal 6 is SIGABRT -- see /usr/include/sys/signal.h. A process dying with this signal is usually due to it calling the abort(3) function. That generally indicates that the process itself has found that some essential pre-requisite for correct function is not available and voluntarily killing itself, rather than the process being killed by the kernel because it ran over resource limits or looked at memory addresses funny or something.